Trainz/Tutorial for Blender/Tutorial to texture a basic house: in 2.65

Note some tutorials talk about UV unwrapping then exporting the texture file and editing it externally. This is a more complex method with additional steps and is NOT used here.

First we need a texture file kuid 86627:2491 Leopold Lane has a suitable texture file. It is actually larger than we need for a simple house but does have the roof and stone work we need.

None essential information: The texture is laid out for tiling in Blender, the house and roof are actually mirrored in the center so they will tile seamlessly. The garden wall can either be used under the house if the house is extended below ground level useful for hills or it can be used separately as the garden wall texture. If you build a terrace then by adding planes over the existing doors you can change the colour of the doors to vary the terrace. The planes are mapped to the doors in the texture above. Note also that the night mode texture or lit windows are included in the main texture.

Life is easier if we can see the model and the texture file at the same time so we'll split the screen. Right click the mouse to get the split screen option then left click to split the screen.

You can resize the windows by clicking and dragging with the mouse on the boundary

supports Trainz Blender texturing tutorial

We'll move the roof to a different layer and just texture the remaining box so Right click to select then "M" brings up the move to layer option, select one that isn't being used.

Move object to different layer

Non essential information: You can go directly to another layer to select the roof. You do not need to do this at the moment, texture the house without the roof first.

Select layer

We'll use one window for the model and the other to display the texture file.

Display the texture file

We may need to widen the column on the right to reach the red checkered box

The important Red Checkered Box

We need to tell Blender this file is an image

This file is an image

We must then locate the file in the folder

Point to file

Display the file

Select the box and change to edit mode, select faces, probably not required but doesn't hurt.

type U then select smart UV project project

UV mapping

To display the image on the box in the Display section of the Properties sidemenu (Nkey), a checkmark at the entry 'Solid Texturing' and press the Zkey toggle to show solid texturing in the 3D window. Now your uv texturing should show up in solid display mode.

Show mapping on box

That basically has unwrapped your texture file onto the box. We can rearrange it by selecting one face in the left window then in the right window moving the vertices that map the object to the image.

Select face and move mapping

We should reduce the poly count by deleting any unseen faces otherwise Trainz has to do extra work to render them.